12/6/06: questions from the pen

Dearest Po,

I’m writing you out of pure… surely there must be a German word for the inbreeding between hope and hopelessness. I’m fairly sure the overall result is positive, but it’s quite close.
I bring you a portion of the “Writer’s Almanac” from yesterday, December 5, 2006.

The novelist James Lee Burke, born Houston 1936, best known for a series of detective novels featuring Dave Robesheau, an ex-New Orleans policeman and Vietnam vet, and recovering alcoholic. James Lee Burke, who was in a bad way after graduate school; he was writing novels, none of them sold very well. He suffered from depression, alcoholism. He’d finished a book called _The Lost, Get Back Bookie_. He couldn’t find anybody to publish it. It was rejected by 93 different publishers over ten years. He was working as a newspaper reporter and a social worker and a forest ranger and a teacher and a truck driver. He said “I reached a point where I didn’t care whether I lived or died.” And finally, it was published, 1985 by Louisiana State University Press. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and his novels have done well ever since.

I can only say that, just maybe, almost all of our fears are unfounded. Ninety-three rejections over ten years. Yes, it’s a story we writers hear all the time, how Kerouac or Faulkner who whateverother crazy gunslinger stumbled around from office to office, screaming up at windows to ask for consideration. But ninety-three times, and the fortitude to maintain some kind of belief in that well-traveled work.

This is all made even more appropriate by my line of thinking just two nights ago, about these letters. They’re so self-centered (this I mean in the geometrical sense, rather than the inconsiderate Friend Who Doesn’t Let You Get a Word In, although that’s quite appropriate too, for all these multi-paged letters with so little to do about interaction and so much to do about each little stairstep in my brain); they’re so expository and written with almost none of the general vision of this project as a thing for wider audiences in mind. I’m able to excuse my own behavior with the idea that they’re meant to sound intimate, the reader is not meant to think I wrote the letter to him, but to these people who are my fishnet, spread around the country. As well as an “it’s better to be writing rough drafts than nothing at all” attitude. I do worry that I’ll finish up with these, get tired of writing about how I love the snow and people and trees and traffic here, and realize all this was was a way to keep myself busy. Chat with myself for a few hours a week because I’ve elected all this time “off” and the rest of the world is working and unavailable for my crazy tinkering. Of course there’s the added problem of finding a local Po who bounces my ideas back so well.

Ninety-three rejections. Which reminds me, are you sending work out from Antarctica? I think that, looking at our respective ages, it’s coming time that we declare a formal philosophy on it. I’m certainly not taking the accepted route – through MFA Iowa and early twenties first chapbook, several journals, etc. And you – who knows when you’ll be within 1,000 miles of a grad school next (however, wouldn’t it be amazing to do it from Antarctica, all online. I bet they’d put on a ceremony for you down there. Those folks in the rec department are just *dying* for reasons to put on shows, y’know). I think I *am* getting somewhat tempted to send that one old Kentucky thing out, but if I’m to be totally honest, there are two reasons I haven’t begun:
+ It’s format is difficult to figure out. I don’t want to cut those 24 little pieces off from each other. Too small for a chapbook, too big to fit into a journal.
+ Part of me thinks, if I *were* to get that published, what would I have left? It’s been one of the very very few things that I continue to think might be worthy. So, what after that?

But my life starts anew on January 1st. Did I mention? My six months just so happens to come to an end at that point. I’ll be looking for a job. Officially dying to get back to school. Slate and I will have to start figuring out whether we want to stay in Ann Arbor for (at least) 2-3 years, as they’re going to offer her a nice little spot at the Commission. Maybe I’ll decide to hell with it, and I’ll ask my more formal, with-it writing buddy to help me figure out where to put this thing.

So we’ve missed each other for several weeks now, but you’re worrying more than necessary. I haven’t had a chance to email you back and say “no, don’t worry! I was swept up in a whirlwind to Chicago that Thursday!” It felt so like the old college days of latenight departures to Bowling Green for glassy-eyed epiphanies and Denny’s. We had no idea we’d be going. We arrived at the train station, got out, and heard that train tooting it’s way down the middle of the street. And at some point I’ve got to tell you about the Union League Club of Chicago and its lack of ability to locate itself gently between old class and today (as a teaser, I’ll tell you that, if you’re wearing jeans or anything less than what is appropriate as a bean-pusher at Starbucks, you have to use the “Athletic Entrance,” the signs for which were quite freshly painted over, most likely over “Brown People’s Entrance”). But you’ve surely been continuing your attendence at that little writer’s drink+talk club and I want to know whether you believe it’s helping. Don’t worry, I’d never consider changing my formal attitude on writer’s clubs – that TNLF was the perfect form and all others be damned – but I do want to hear whether you’re growing or hearing beautiful things or learning new skills. I want to re-read the story you sent me. Yes, the one I sent you comments on and you wrote me back saying something about how I’d not commented on it. Which was strictly appalling. You should know by now that my commentary will come in strange ways… I like to think of it as an attempt to lift the painted backdrop of a road up off the stage to reveal… more road. Continue your journey, dear Po, for this road is no plywood board.

It’s about time for me to get on my way. We’re starting true winter here – last night the laundromat closed early because no other fools were desperate enough to be waiting for their mittens to dry. But today the sun is out (it sure does like to prolong its goodbyes, eh?) and the sidewalks are clear and I have fresh, warm sweatshirts to pile on.

I hope you’re getting some exercise down there, that you haven’t forgotten the greenhouse and quiet time and, most importantly, how to build yourself an igloo if your monster truck breaks down. Maybe the reason I can’t start these books on Everest that Slate’s coworker sent home to me is because I’ll start transferring you there.

As ever,

T

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